Private life / Public space

Tanja Engelberts, Maarten van Schaik

Seelevel Gallery displays works by four different artist who are concerned with the movements and behavior of people in cities and crowded spaces.

Artist talk
As part of the exhibition Seelevel Gallery organizes an artist talk on Thursday, June 23, in which the participating artists will present their own work.
The introduction will be done by Naomi Jacobs. She is a junior philosophy lecturer at the Technical University of Eindhoven and works as a freelance publicist, discussion leader and producer. Jacobs wrote the essay Mixofobie and the city, a plea for public spaces where the strange is celebrated rather than feared. The search for the stranger in the city is a major theme in the work of the participating photographers.

The anonymity gained from living in crowded cities, enables us to watch each other without being noticed. While watching each other, we get a glimpse of the private lifes of people moving in the public space. Since its invention, the camera has often been used to preserve such voyeuristic acts. However, the street photographer always remains partly an outsider, he observes and records life on the streets but can never be an integral part of what he is observing. The participating artists of this exhibition attempt to capture movements and behavior of people in cities and in crowded spaces, they explore how the behavior of people is related to the city they are part of.

Tanja Engelberts, Crowd (untitled, nr. 8), 2010

Tanja Engelberts shows her project Crowd at Seelevel Gallery. With this work she shows the ongoing movement of the endless city Tokyo, Japan. At the base of the project is a series of collages. This series shows people moving through an eerie cityscape. Figures appear and dissapear, mimicking the movement of the streets. The collages form the outline for an installation, which exists of a small cluster of figures on translucent paper hanging from the ceiling. The viewer becomes participant, by walking through this installation.

Sander Foederer, Mute, 2015

The practice of Sander Foederer is centered upon the fundamental and potentially extraordinary act of perceiving the world around us. Time and light, and how they connect to inner experience, are his main areas of research. Other key themes in his work include: the aesthetics of the everyday, social geography, and art’s ability to represent the transcendent. His recent project Mute addresses the experience of the sublime – both terrifying and ecstatic – and the ambiguity of the resulting facial expression. How big is the disparity between happiness and terror? What does this say when applied to our self-image and the era in which we live?

Bas Losekoot, London – The Urban Millennium Project, 2011 – 2016

In this exhibition Bas Losekoot presents a visual essay in which he provides insight in the psychological journey of commuters in modern megacities and how the fast growing population density influences the behavior of the inhabitants in these cities. Placing his camera in the liminal spaces of the city, he is addressing the state of in-between-ness of the modern urban experience. With an intuitive eye, he observes the ‘presentation of self’ and ‘micro-second meetings’ that everyday urban encounters prevail. Using a cinematic apparatus, he succeeds to capture details out of the everyday that normally remain unseen; displaying an intimate thought-provoking vision on private lives in the public domain.

Maarten van Schaik, Ghost for a year MMDCC, 2015

The work of Maarten van Schaik is made during long walks in the city and its outskirts. He worked in various places, such as Las Vegas, New York, Bangkok and Amsterdam. Inside the complexity of the city, van Schaik is looking for “black holes” or “non-places”, where color, light, passersby and strange objects play together inside the frame of his camera. During Private life / Public space his series Ghost for a year will be displayed. For this project Van Schaik wandered the streets of Amsterdam, Lanzarote and Las Vegas, feeling like a ghost, stuck in a world between fantasy and reality.